University of Victoria chaplain marks solstice with pagan rituals

UPDATE: Winter solstice occurs on Monday. Based on requests, I’m re-posting this earlier piece on how wiccans mark the longest night of the year.

B.C. wiccans celebrate solstice with Yule rituals:

Pagans mark longer daylight hours, ‘rebirth of the sun’ with sacred new year festival

Vancouver Sun ARCHIVES Monday, December 22, 2003 Byline: Douglas Todd

The winter solstice, which marks the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, is a sacred day to Heather Botting, a pagan chaplain at the University of Victoria.

It is Yule: the festival to celebrate light, the sun and God.

During Yule, which occurs today, Botting leads dozens of students and staff through a series of joyous rituals involving cauldrons, knives, wine, dance, cakes, holly, ivy and stag antlers.

In the Anglo-Saxon and Norse pagan traditions, Yule is the New Year. “For many pagans it is truly the darkest day of the year,” Botting says.

“For that reason it’s the celebration of the rebirth of the sun, and the sun is generally associated with God.”

On Yule, UVic’s interfaith chapel typically churns with pagans, or wiccans, marking the return of longer daylight hours by swirling in a crack-the-whip-like dance, revering stag antlers because they signify the cycle of life, and dipping a ceremonial knife into a cast-iron cauldron of wine — to symbolize the unity of male and female divinity.

After five years as an the administration-approved pagan chaplain — with the right to perform marriages — at the 30,000-student UVic, Botting can’t prove she’s unique.

Still, she says, “I haven’t been able to find another pagan chaplain anywhere else in the world.”

Botting (left) is a wiccan priestess in what might also be one of the planet’s most witch-friendly cities, Greater Victoria (population 280,000), where more than 1,000 people officially told Canadian census-takers they were pagans.

Paganism is Canada’s fastest-growing religion, according to Statistics Canada. The number of self-declared pagans in 2001 grew by 281 per cent from a decade earlier.

There are now 21,080 pagans in Canada, with 6,100 in B.C. and 2,800 in Greater Vancouver. That’s more, for instance, than the number of Salvation Army members.

But Inar Hansen, vice-president, or “bard,” of the university’s 150-member Thorn and Oak Student Pagan Club, argues the census figures only hint at wicca’s rising popularity, especially in Victoria.

The government’s data doesn’t count, he says, the many witches who have yet to “come out of the broom closet.”

Hansen maintains tens of thousands of residents of the West Coast — in B.C., Washington, Oregon and California — practise paganism, often informally and eclectically.

The University of Victoria’s acclaimed poet and English professor, the late Robin Skelton, paved the way for sophisticated paganism in Victoria, Botting says. His daughter now runs a large pagan group known as Thirteenth House.

Botting, 55, follows in Skelton’s academic tradition. With her PhD, she teaches religious studies, mythology and medical sociology in the university’s anthropology department.

A former Jehovah’s Witness who left the religion decades ago, Botting is also co-author of the acclaimed book, The Orwellian World of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (University of Toronto Press).

In a rare example of North American pagans moving into the mainstream, Botting and other members of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church won B.C. government approval in the late 1990s to legally conduct marriages, after being officially recognized as a religion.

Botting and fellow pagans also run a chaplaincy at Victoria’s hospitals and at Vancouver Island’s William Head prison. In addition, she says, many wiccans, because they revere nature, are active in the environmental movement.

Yule (from the Old English word referring to the winter season) is one of eight big pagan rituals each year, Botting says — even though not all pagans treat Yule as a New Year’s celebration. (Many mark the new year on Halloween on Oct. 31, or what witches call Samhain).

In the fourth century, Botting says, Roman Emperor Constantine, a convert to Christianity, created today’s Christmas event by borrowing from a popular pagan winter festival similar to Yule.

Constantine chose Dec. 25, when sunshine hours began to grow longer in the northern hemisphere, as the time to celebrate the sacred birth of Jesus.

“There are real parallels between the pagan and Christian traditions,” Botting says.

“In both paganism and Christianity, the winter solstice would be the celebration of the birth of light, of divine light, of regeneration.”

Botting says many members of UVic’s Thorn and Oak Pagan Students Club (www.thornoak.com) who take part in Yule festivities originally hail from smaller towns.

Before arriving on campus, they tended to practise witchcraft on their own, with books bought from book stores, which these days typically sport large sections on witchcraft. They might also have enjoyed such witch-based shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Craft or Practical Magic.

“As chaplain, the students come to see me with standard student issues: They wonder what they’re doing with their lives. But they also want to know more about pagan tradition,” Botting says.

“Some of them come to our community rituals expecting weird things to happen. Some might think witchcraft is used to magically control people. But they soon learn that’s not what witchcraft is about. It’s about the Earth and the cycle of life.”

Hansen, a 27-year-old pagan leader in his last year of nursing at UVic, says he and his girlfriend, who helps lead rituals, find many students come to campus believing witchcraft is about casting magic spells.

“They’re insecure. They’re looking for power outside themselves,” he says. “But the key to paganism is to ‘know thyself,’ to find balance within yourself and the universe, to feel the life energy, which is both male and female, and realize witchcraft is not about hocus-pocus.”

While Botting hasn’t witnessed serious discrimination against pagans while she’s been on campus, Hansen regrets that the student pagan club’s posters are often defaced with phrases such as, “Christ is Lord.”

Many conservative religious people are taught paganism is about worshipping Satan, Hansen says.

“But it has nothing to do with that.” Paganism is open to psychic phenomenon, but Hansen says the last thing he wants is to revere evil spirits.

This year, Botting’s public Yule celebration took place at 7 p.m. on Sunday at UVic’s interfaith chapel, which also offers services for Catholics, Anglicans, United Church members, Pentecostals, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, B’ahai adherents, Christian Science members, Lutherans and Unitarians.

A useful way to think about Yule, Botting explains, is as a celebration of God as “the Winter-born king,” as an event that symbolizes the rebirth of the life-sustaining sun.

At a personal level, she says, it’s a time to shed the dross of the previous year and contemplate new avenues of spiritual development.

“For me it’s simply a celebration of the turning of the year,” adds Hansen.

“It marks how the darkest time is now upon us, but that the sun will soon get bigger and grow, that life is coming back. That we have no worries.”

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Market to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.